With that I took two or three steps down the hill—­but felt the old man’s hand on my arm.

“Say, mister,” he asked, “are you one of the electric company men?  Is that high-tension line comin’ across here?”

“No,” I said, “it is something more valuable than that!”

I walked onward a few steps, as though I was quite determined to get out of his field, but he followed close behind me.

“It ain’t the new trolley line, is it?”

“No,” I said, “it isn’t the trolley line.”

“What is it, then?”

In that question, eager and shrill, spoke the dry soul of the old man, the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barren acres would bring him from the outside some miraculous profit.

His whole bearing had changed.  He had ceased to be truculent or even fearful, but was now shrilly beseeching, A great wave of compassion came over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of his own making, and expecting wealth from the outside when there was wealth in plenty within and everywhere about him.

But how could I help him?  You can give no valuable thing to any man who has not the vision to take it.  If I had told him what I found upon his hill or in his fields he would have thought me—­well, crazy; or he would have suspected that under cover of such a quest I hid some evil design.  As well talk adventure to an old party man, or growth to a set churchman.

So I left him there within his walls.  So often when we think we are barring other people out, we are only barring ourselves in.  The last I saw of him as I turned into the road was a gray and crabbed figure standing alone, looking after me, and not far off his own sign: 

[Illustration:  No trespass James Howieson]

Sometime, I thought, this old farm will be owned by a man who is also capable of possessing it.  More than one such place I know already has been taken by those who value the beauty of the hills and the old walls, and the boulder-strewn fields.  One I know is really possessed by a man who long ago had a vision of sheep feeding on fields too infertile to produce profitable crops, and many others have been taken by men who saw forests growing where forests ought to grow.  For real possession is not a thing of inheritance or of documents, but of the spirit; and passes by vision and imagination.  Sometimes, indeed, the trespass signs stand long—­so long that we grow impatient—­but nature is in no hurry.  Nature waits, and presently the trespass signs rot away, one arm falls off, and lo! where the adventurer found only denial before he is now invited to—­“pass.”  The old walls are conquered by the wild cherries and purple ivy and blackberry bushes, and the old Howiesons sleep in calm forgetfulness of their rights upon the hills they thought they possessed, and all that is left is a touch of beauty—­lilac clump and wild-rose tangle.